This is a short page. It points out the danger
of placing confidence in official documents. Official documents, whether
public or private, very often have an advocacy function. That danger was
succinctly expressed by John Martin Vincent (1911) in this way:

All of these fall more or
less into the category of strategy. . . In giving the causes for the declaration
of war, each side may be relied on to give reasons favorable to itself.

This used to be standard knowledge. When that
knowledge is not possessed, or when it is ignored, we have a substandard
situation. In the following story, names have not been changed, and all
information given is from firsthand knowledge.

The Marco Polo (or Lugou) Bridge is an impressive
stone structure about ten miles outside of Peking. On 7 July 1937, it was
the scene of an "Incident" between Japanese troops (operating
somewhat south of the border of Manchuria; their presence had already been
the subject of a futile Chinese protest to the League of Nations) and local
Chinese ones. Improprieties were claimed. Hostilities rapidly escalated.
This is usually regarded as the date of the opening of World War 2 (Asian
Version).

Robert Butow (Japan's Decision to Surrender,
1954; Tojo and the Coming of the War, 1961) had made a reputation for himself
by his energy in utilizing original Japanese sources for the Pacific War.
Like many modern historians, including the infamous Levenson,
he had contempt for classical models and classical cautions. He regarded
modern documents as intrinsically unproblematic. His approach, which had
demonstrably worked for him, was simplistic. To his PhD students, he gave
this recipe for success: (1) get a grant, (2) go to Japan, (3) locate a
document, preferably an official one, which no one else has used, (4) write
it up, and (5) there you are. One thesis had been written on this model
by Katsu Hirai. Her subject was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. In the oral
examination, Hellmut Wilhelm challenged a particular detail. Katsu responded
by citing an official Japanese government document. Hellmut's reply deserves
to be immortal, and it is the intention of this page to make it immortal.
He said:

"I was
there. It isn't true."

It might be imagined that a crisis ensued,
at that exam session, but it did not. The outcome could have been predicted
by anyone who knows academe. Department protocol took precedence, as it
always does, over all other considerations, including historical truth.
The candidate passed. The thesis was accepted without change. The degree
was awarded. Departmental colleagueships continued unruffled. Hellmut used
to tell this story with his usual roguish twinkle. As for Robert Butow,
he continued to instruct students in his no-brain approach to doing history.

That was a loss for history, and Hellmut's
twinkle, however charming as a way of losing an argument (or not having
an argument), was out of place. The methodological issue needed to be fought
to a finish, and the right people needed to win. The right position may
be summed up thus: All documents, including modern ones, need to be examined
with a close philological and historical eye. The tendency of reports to
embody what superiors want to hear, and the tendency for government documents
to justify government policy, need to be routinely recognized by anyone
presuming to meddle in the difficult business of finding out what happened
in the past. We can't assume that the last of our troubles with Japanese
documents are over when we have learned to read Japanese documents. On the
contrary, our troubles are just beginning. In the case here described, caution
was all the more called for, given the transparently phony nature of the
Incident itself, in which a war just waiting to happen found a way to construct
just the pretext that it needed.

So much for modern times. We also need to recognize
the potentially lying nature of the boasts of ancient rulers, as seen in
their official likenesses, their public inscriptions, or their state records.
An official lie, a government lie, does not advance in credibility merely
by being buried in the ground for two thousand years. Whether governments
lie about the atrocities of the other side, or brag about their own atrocities,
modern ones have no monopoly on lying. Ancient governments knew all about
it. It is only the historian (it can sometimes seem) who has never heard
of it, and who wanders innocently back and forth, wide-eyed in a fantastical
landscape, believing every conquest claimed, and accepting every atrocity
asserted.

It is not good enough. The historian himself
should be deeply honest, as Ranke
enjoins. But it is going too far to impute honesty to the people who wrote
the source documents. There are too many other kinds of work that a source
document, in its own time, may have found to do.